I arrived earlier today, and have spent pretty much the entire time since settling in and socializing. Keep an eye on the usual location for all the new pictures, and I’ll post here as I get the opportunity.

It’s that time of year where we all get a few days off to play with our synthesizers, and some of us are gearing up for the winter NAMM show in less than a month. Let this be a reminder that despite this blog’s usually-low rate of posts, I *will* be covering the NAMM show here again this year, so keep your eyes opened.

We had our annual AH Bay Area gathering this last weekend, and it was great fun as usual. We raised around $300 for the Bob Moog Foundation, as well. The Hacker Dojo was a perfect venue for our get-together, and with minor exceptions, the whole thing went off without a hitch. I hope to work with them again in the future. There were a couple film guys taking video for a documentary, so it should be exciting to see how that turns out.

Special thanks to Paul Schreiber of MOTM who supplied lunchtime pizza, saving all of us from a trip out of our temporary home in search of food.

New designs were showcased from both MOTM (E340, E350 eurorack modules), and Magic Smoke (Voltage Controlled Phase Oscillator). We had both old and new SEMs to compare, and attendees even brought two of the recent Korg product launches (Wavedrum and MicroSampler).

I’ve put up my gallery of pictures from the event here, but below are a couple sample images.

In case you missed it the first few times the info went out, our annual AHBayArea meetup is November 14th, just two weeks away. Get all the relevent info here

We’ve got a great venue this year, and we’ll have our now-traditional raffle to benefit the Moog Foundation, so bring your items for donations and your cash for raffle tickets, it should be a blast, as usual!

Seems like D16 may be working on an SH-101 plugin. I’m all for it if they do as good a job on this as they did with the 808/909. I could use a few more instances of my real 101, I just can’t get enough of that sound.

That said, based upon this image it looks like they’re implementing an arpeggiator but no sequencer. The SH-101 sequencer was so easy to use and fun to churn out simple patterns with that its omission would really bum me out. Don’t do it D16! Do this one up right!

I stopped by a friend’s new digs on Tuesday night, and just had to take a shot of his 202. I *WILL* have one, someday. And the first thing I do to it will be to bypass the CPU on the CV/Gate inputs. Still, hard to beat that synth in such a compact size.

For a period in the late 90’s early 00’s, FutureMusic ran a series of covers spicing things up in an incredibly tacky way with cover models holding the synth reviewed that month.

What was the point of this? It’s tacky and sexist. The only thing sexy about a woman with a synthesizer is if she knows how to USE it, and I have a strong inclination that this wasn’t the case here.

Anyhow, these mags recently came up on MatrixSynth, and it seems that not many people still have them, so I dug through my collection and scanned the ones I have. I believe there are others I do not own that were released after my FM collection ends.

As I said, I personally find them tacky and sexist, but I guess I’ll let you decide. Click the image below to go to the full flickr set.

The latest thing in analog is digital. Computer control of CV direct through a DC-capable audio interface.

So I acquired such an audio interface and the two plugins that have been released for these purposes, MOTU’s Volta and Expert Sleepers’ Silent Way.

I’m using a non-MOTU interface, so there are some kinks to work out there with Volta, but MOTU is being plenty helpful, and I trust we’ll get things worked out eventually. In the meantime, here’s Silent Way controlling my 101 via my simplified CV/Gate test rig. 6 octaves of perfect tuning!